They can get a little surly, sure, Otis more than Daisy. “I’m lucky, both my kids are naturally kind.
“It’s the way most of us were born,” he says. N iceness is intrinsic to the Sudeikis brand these days and it’s clearly an ideal he believes in. And so, how would you deal with these conflicts? From back in 2015, when we were first thinking: ‘What is this thing?’ I just knew inside that this guy was real. “And yet it has to honour the fact that not everywhere else outside that utopia is utopian. But Sudeikis is clearly thinking beyond that: can his little show about a fish-out-of-water football coach leave a lasting legacy of compassion on those who watched it? “Richmond is, metaphorically, like a form of utopia,” he says. Not just getting to play the characters, but also, what do you want to put out there into the world?”Īs Ted Lasso approaches the climax of its third – and, Sudeikis insists, final – season, the stakes are higher than ever before. “Well, how about, ‘Write the change you want to see in the world’? Part of the joy of getting to do this neat job I’ve got to do is the wish-fulfilment. “You know, ‘Be the change you want to see in the world,’” says Sudeikis now, paraphrasing Mahatma Gandhi.
At the White House, Sudeikis referred to Ted Lasso – the show and the man – as “wish-fulfilment”.
OLIVIA WILDE JASON SUDEIKIS TONIGHT SHOW SERIES
When the series first aired, Sudeikis would make a joke of the comparison, saying something along the lines of: Lasso was like Jason Sudeikis, but after two beers on an empty stomach. Where Lasso begins and Sudeikis ends has become a recurring fascination over the past few years. His language can be quaintly anachronistic: “I’m pleased as pie!” he exclaims at one point.īalancing act: Jason Sudeikis, as Ted Lasso, keeping a lot of balls in the air. Sudeikis looks a little bleary-eyed after flying in from Los Angeles with his children, Otis and Daisy, aged nine and six, but he is assiduously polite and attentive. Lasso’s trademark squirrel’s-tail moustache has been allowed to grow out into a patchier, salt-and-pepper beard. This morning, in a hotel room in London’s Soho, the actor, 47, wears Nike running shoes, faded jeans, a mint-green hoodie and a baseball cap. It is a very Ted Lasso move to turn up at the White House in sneakers and a sweatshirt, but also in keeping with Sudeikis himself. “I haven’t even looked at the pictures of the White House yet because I want it to just live up there for a while” – he taps his forehead – “as this amazing firework show rather than saying, ‘Oh, boy, why did I wear sneakers?’ Haha, on the day I got a text from my mom saying, ‘Make sure you don’t wear sneakers to the White House.’ I was like, ‘Too late, Mom.’” “It’s nuts, man,” says Sudeikis, shaking his head. Someone – presumably not President Biden himself, but you never know – had taped up a blue and yellow sign reading “BELIEVE”, the motto of AFC Richmond, above the door to the Oval Office. Sudeikis and the rest of the cast had been invited to the White House to discuss mental-health strategies. Meanwhile, in a move no one predicted, Coach Lasso has become a guru for our age: a case study of kindness and decency triumphing in a cynical modern world. ‘I don’t think my midwestern sensibilities would even allow my wildest imagination the opportunity to think the thing would become what it’s become’: Jason Sudeikis. He just makes you feel at home and that home just happened to be the White House for that afternoon.” It’s like meeting your good friend’s father or your young friend’s grandfather. And I’d met the president when he was vice president and he’s a very warm guy. “I’d been in a fake Oval Office a number of times,” says Sudeikis today, a few weeks on, “and so there’s a little bit of me that’s nonplussed by it and just holding my shit together. So while his Ted Lasso colleagues were losing their minds – Brett Goldstein, the British actor who plays hard-nut ex-footballer Roy Kent, later admitted he was freaking out about what to do with his hands and spent the whole time trying not to swear – Sudeikis remained calm, somewhat. One of his beats was impersonating politicians, and Sudeikis made recurring appearances as George W Bush and Joe Biden, when he was vice-president to Barack Obama, in a mocked-up version of the same room. Before he was the creator and star of Apple TV+’s feelgood global sensation Ted Lasso, he spent almost a decade writing and performing sketch comedy on the US show Saturday Night Live. J ason Sudeikis felt, weirdly, not that weird when he stepped into the Oval Office of the White House, back in March.
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